"The first time I catched Tom private I asked him what was his idea, time of the evasion? -- what it was he'd planned to do if the evasion worked all right and he managed to set a nigger free that was already free before?" -- Mark Twain, _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_, Chapter 43> To my mind, the rejection of Mark Twain's HUCK FINN as"racist" because it uses the "N word"Just for accuracy's sake. I suppose some label racist for that reason, but the feature of the book focused on by those who read it is not the language but that last terrible section in which Tom Sawyer frees Jim. Try to imagine a book in which two black men subject a white woman to such humiliation in the process of helping her escape from a gang of black hoodlums.That's no reason to ban the book -- it is a reason to take a second look at it. Carrol
***** Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn, edited by James S. Leonard, Thomas A. Tenney, and Thadious M. Davis (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992)
Reviewed by James Tysse
...Charles H. Nilon's essay, "The Ending of Huckleberry Finn: 'Freeing the Free Negro,' is an excellent defense of the book as a whole, but especially the ultra-controversial closing twelve chapters. Until reading Nilon's essay, I agreed with a great deal of Huckleberry Finn scholarship which roundly condemned the closing of the book as an anticlimactic failure on Twain's part, because of the way he seems to go against many of the morals and themes contained in the book up to that point by allowing Tom and Huck to make a mockery of his freedom. However, Nilon argues quite convincingly that the last few chapters are an ironic triumph for Twain, by using it as a metaphor for the way blacks were treated by whites during the time in which the book was published. The failures of reconstruction and the patronizing and often brutal treatment to which whites subjected blacks in the postbellum South allow him, through the prison chapters, to metaphorically comment on the sorry state of contemporary race relations....
<http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/enam482e/reviews/tysse.html> *****
***** BOOK REVIEW
Wieck, Carl F. Refiguring Huckleberry Finn. University of Georgia Press, 2000. Pp. 239. $40.00. ISBN 0-8203-2238-5.
Commissions are donated to the Mark Twain Project
The following review appeared 21 March 2001 on the Mark Twain Forum.
Reviewed by: William Hecker [EMAIL PROTECTED]
... Building on Louis Budd's observation that Tom's dishonesty and selfish manipulation of Jim is unmistakable commentary on the "Southern question," Wieck asserts that the Evasion section also foretells the shameful social inequality of America's post-reconstruction era and forecasts that the nation would not address this injustice for generations to come....
<http://www.yorku.ca/twainweb/reviews/wieck.html> *****
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Yoshie
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